Robotic object pose estimation with deep neural networks

Abstract

In this work, we introduce pose interpreter networks for 6-DoF object pose estimation. In contrast to other CNN-based approaches to pose estimation that require expensively-annotated object pose data, our pose interpreter network is trained entirely on synthetic data. We use object masks as an intermediate representation to bridge real and synthetic. We show that when combined with a segmentation model trained on RGB images, our synthetically-trained pose interpreter network is able to generalize to real data. Our end-to-end system for object pose estimation runs in real-time (20 Hz) on live RGB data, without using depth information or ICP refinement.